West Dunbartonshire faces an ever-increasing number of incidents of domestic abuse, Conservative MSP Pam Gold the Scottish Parliament on Thursday.
She said: “It has been reported that the total number of women and children who experience domestic abuse in West Dunbartonshire and ask for help rose by 7.59 per cent to 1,729 in just one year.
“Those are shocking figures. They make West Dunbartonshire the local authority with the second-largest number of recorded incidents per 10,000 people.”
She added: “At the same time, services that offer vital support are starving for funding. When I brought that up during the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee meeting on Tuesday, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government [Shona Robison] blamed misogyny and not her own Government’s shortcomings.
“Can the First Minister guarantee that services in the Highlands, in West Dunbartonshire and across the country will receive the funding that they deserve?”
“In my answers to all questions about violence against women and girls, I have made no secret of my view that the behaviour of men has to be confronted.
“It is completely legitimate for that argument to be made in Parliament or in parliamentary committees.”
He added: “I say to Pam Gosal that an important opportunity is coming up in the next few weeks to vote to provide resource to women’s aid organisations and to tackle domestic violence.
“That will happen only if Parliament supports the Government’s budget. I will certainly be voting for the Government’s budget and I encourage others to do likewise.”
Top of page picture: MSP Pam Gosal talks to a woman’s group about domestic abuse.
Just another grim metric of the decline in our area.
Murder, assault, abuse sit alongside increasing poverty as living standards decline. Broken Britain, broken Scotland and broken locally how have we gotten in to this mess. And all the while the politicos who are well paid play political Ya-boo.
One only need look at the chaos in Westminster about members of the royal family and senior politicians being in the pay of an international crime ring. But has any of us heard anything about what the Government are going to do to clean up the corruption that sits at the very highest levels. Of course they haven’t. And then we wonder why our society has all the problems that it has.
Better together. Yes if you are a politico or a royal with your hand in the tin.
Time folks woke up to what is going on around them and get the sty cleaned out. And if we don’t it is only going to get worse and addect more folks than it does just now